


Recipe for Disaster

by Rachel24601



Category: Prison Break
Genre: Bad Cooking, Cooking, Crack Treated Seriously, Doctor/Patient, Drugs, F/M, Food Metaphors, Kidnapping, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23130661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rachel24601/pseuds/Rachel24601
Summary: Six-month sober, the biggest Sara Tancredi faces one moment is what she's going to make for dinner when her father comes and visit. The next, it's figuring out how to make it out alive as two handsome and armed fugitives take her hostage in her own car. That dinner sure looks like it's turning into a recipe for disaster. Crack treated seriously.
Relationships: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Recipe for Disaster

1

There was still that same thought in Sara’s head, even as her eyes connected the gun barrel in front of her with the male voice whose words struck like shards of glass, “Get in the car! Now!” It was an absurd moment, floating out of reality, so she could see the gun, have the danger of the situation sink into her truly, while still the old worries that had seemed such a big deal three seconds before remained caged inside her brain, no longer relevant, of course, but finding no escape door through which they might slip away and disintegrate.

What was she going to make for dinner?

That was the real problem, before those men popped up before her eyes with all their shouts and guns and the sudden, unbelievably real threat of violence and death crashed at her feet like a bright-red dynamite bomb.

What was she going to make for dinner?

Sara didn’t usually have many visitors who cared for such formalities as having tasty homemade food on the table, didn’t have many visitors at all, really, and it had been just a little over a year since her father had featured the list.

Oh, he was a busy man. Work, all work, governing Illinois with an iron hand, so his campaign advisors’ slogan proudly asserted, and if he might have found the time for a nice, supportive daughter, well –

Sara just hadn’t been winning any daughter-of-the-year awards recently, had she?

No, no. She’d been doing _better_ , lately, if not exactly ‘fine’, naturally not meeting the standards of Justice Frank, who would have been much better off with a photogenic daughter whose tame beauty and elegance would effectively soften his image.

Ah.

Her life would have been so much easier, she sometimes thought, if she had just consented to be that depthless, glasslike young woman, then she would have always had daddy’s approval and with little effort on her part, really. Just doing such things as smiling, playfully bantering with him before journalists, saying he oughtn’t be so tough on crime as that, and Frank Tancredi would have looked better and more popular for that small touch of femininity she brought to his all-too-male image.

Small, easy things to do. Like cooking dinner.

Yes.

But Sara just hadn’t been able to take that easy way out, found she could not satisfactorily smoothen all her rougher edges, could not be docile enough, _woman_ enough, to meet polite society’s demands.

But wasn’t she making progress?

Three months ago, she’d been released from rehab (not for the first time, but this time was gonna stick, she didn’t know that but it would be wrong not to say it) and since, she’d been sedulously going to AA meetings, five nights a week, enough that Joe, the head of the group, would trust her to provide the tea supply and no longer bothered to arrange for there to be some in store, _just in case_.

_Miss Tea_ , he called her, when there was no one else around, as if no one had thought to cleverly pun with the name ‘Tancredi’ before.

Anyway.

She was on the right tracks, had gotten her six-month sober badge just yesterday night, and as she called her father, it soothed her to play with the smooth, plastic surface, buried deep in her jeans pocket.

Apologizing to those you’ve wronged while you were using was among the first steps of the program, and she had apologized to her father before, many times – but maybe not with her whole heart, because it still felt like, inexplicably, though he had paid for her education, for med school then for rehab, though he had done all this unfalteringly and she knew he would do it again if she were to relapse, part of her still blamed the full of her wrong life choices on him.

Childish, immature anger.

As if she would have done all this, gone through all the trouble and non-negligible pains of addiction, just to escape his pretty-picture daughter frame and the still life he offered.

She had been a little surprised that he agreed to see her at her place, and very inconvenienced by his off-hand mention of ‘dinner’.

Sara had been nine when she had given up cooking; for a playful apprenticeship that was to last all afternoon (and more, of course, if they got on), Sara had been allowed into the kitchen and the cook had dutifully pointed several items and had Sara name them. Sugar. Salt. Flour. Sara first thought she was doing very well at that surprise examination, but that was before the cook sighed and shook her head severely. _No, no, no_. This was not mere sugar but muscovado sugar, couldn’t she tell by its coffee-brown color, its compact crumbly grain? The same with the salt – the cook had her say ‘fleur de sel’ and Sara managed correctly on the first try. She was better at learning foreign languages than she was at amateur cooking.

But no matter, no matter.

Let’s see how she got on with chopping dark chocolate into small chunks.

Indeed, the cook had thought of starting Sara’s apprenticeship with cookies, what all children are supposed to be interested in eating, but the thought of a batch of homemade treats (she’d be allowed to eat one straight out of the oven, the cook promised) proved neither lucky charm nor sufficient incentive.

To the cook’s flabbergasted dismay, Sara did wrong everything a child could possibly be expected to do wrong in a kitchen.

Not out of malice or even innocent playfulness.

Somehow, as Sara grew up to be a doctor, during particularly stressful surgeries, when interns were shouted at and blood started spraying out of an artery, Sara never lost her cool, and her hands never shook. Amused, she sometimes imagined how much more stressful this would be to her, inexplicably, if she were in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant and a batch of _crème brûlées_ was getting burnt, or if a plate of rare lamb was served medium.

Maybe that made her sound to be a little macabre, but Sara had always been more at ease among scalpels and clamps and open bodies than she was with raw food and yelling chefs and kitchen knives.

And so, after Sara’s misshapen cookies had come out of the oven burnt and looking like stray meteors, after she had spilt flour all over, broken a bowl and pricked her finger with a knife, the cook had resigned to dismiss her and said the cookies had best be tossed in the trash and never mentioned again.

The experience had never been tainted with the least bit of bitterness, to Sara’s mind. Not as though her lack of talent in this particular realm had proved a handicap.

But following that phone conversation with her father, she had found herself raking her mind for a dinner plan – because you just didn’t serve takeaway food to the governor of Illinois, even when he was your father.

Sara dived head first into recipes, salty, sweet, they scrolled on her computer screen, but she kept dismissing them as either not fancy enough or too complicated for her to hope she could manage them and obtain a decent result.

And anyway, what sort of meal would say, ‘I swear I’ll never shoot morphine into my veins again or steal drugs from the hospital supply’?

In the end, Sara had decided to rely on quality ingredients. She would buy very good bread, so even if her sauce was found wanting in tastiness, the bread could be eaten with butter and be a self-sufficient aside. Same thing with the salad, purchased at the market, at the exuberant price of five fifty dollars a head, and with the chicken which, burnt or unforgivably undercooked as it might end up, was guaranteed to be a fat and tasty piece, which would need no spectacular skills on her part to make a satisfactory dish.

Sara had been walking alone in the underground parking lot, struggling with her groceries and beeping the doors of her car unlocked, when the reality of the men with the gun had burst in on her all of a sudden.

“Jesus!” One of them yelled. “Fuck.”

And then the other, “Oh my God.”

“Get in the car! Get in the car, quick!”

Sara stared at them blankly, the weight of the grocery bags in her hands seemed to have disappeared, to belong to a different world and a different body.

It was a moment before she could take it all in. The men, who had sprung out of nowhere, had visibly been busy with her car – one of the front windows was broken, she saw, shards of glass spilt over the driver’s seat like a glimpse of the milky way shining on black leather.

They’d meant to steal it.

Yes.

She’d surprised them at work and now –

“Now, we don’t have a choice, Michael. Hurry! We have to take her. She’ll call the cops and –”

‘No, but –”

“We don’t have _time_. Get in.”

The last two words barked as if to break the state of paralysis she found herself in.

Sara did as she was asked. Her brain hadn’t gotten back to its proper functioning yet, and obeying the men with the gun was the easiest thing to do, didn’t need thinking through.

There had been little time for Sara to distinguish between the two men at this point, but in the global, shock-cloaked look she had taken of them both, she noticed one – the one that had been shouting and holding the gun – was a little bigger and a little older.

What happened next demanded truly no effort on her part.

The men took care of it all, like two regular gentleman, wooers in a fairytale or male nurses in a rehab facility.

They opened the car door for her – she was to ride in the back, next to the man who was holding the gun, while the younger man sat at the steering wheel, wiping the broken glass from his seat with the sleeve of his shirt. In the flashing glimpses she caught of him in the rearview mirror, she saw only wide, wild eyes, unmitigated blue.

They rode out of the underground parking lot and into Chicago without causing any disturbances, smooth as a knife plunges into soft butter.

How mad.

Sara expected sirens would be howling after them, that cops would be shouting into megaphones – this is the police! Please stop your vehicle immediately!

But no one minded the broken window, or the fact that they were not wearing their seatbelts or that the man sitting next to her was pointing the barrel of a gun in her direction.

True, the windows in her car were tinted, which was probably what had made them opt for her car in the first place, as they did their car-thieves shopping in the parking lot earlier.

Still, Sara’s heart wouldn’t quiet down to a normal rate and it felt unbelievable that the world outside her car, which had turned into a private world of hell, could be the same old everyday Chicago, Church bells ringing as on every Sunday morning, spicy smells from the market flying in through the open window.

Should she scream?

Should she thrust her body toward the car door, press the knob and dive out like a suicidal bird shooting into a window?

The bag of groceries was still in her arms, crushing her chest and smothering the dull sound of her hammering heartbeat.

“Oh, Linc,” she heard the younger man say.

There was a touch of softness in his voice in synch with the urgency she sometimes caught in the rearview mirror, at the crossroads where she would meet his blue eyes.

“What are we supposed to do now? This is wrong? This is –”

“No choice,” the other man answered.

He had a way of speaking that Sara wouldn’t know how to sum up if not by a nearly clinical economy of words.

She normally admired people who knew how to express themselves so, who would not waste their breath or the time of the person sitting in front of them.

But right now, of course, circumstances being what they were –

“She’s got no reason to turn a blind eye on this and three hundred thousand reasons to turn us in.”

Sara wanted to speak, as if a quick clarification of the situation would somehow solve all of this. _Wait, but I’ve got no idea who you are! No, I really don’t mean to call the police, trust me!_ Oh, then, get out of the car this minute! Thanks for the ride young lady!

But no words came out.

In truth, she did have a small idea.

No flash of recognition had entered her brain, between the moment when she had first stumbled upon the men and however long this had been lasting, this here, sitting in the backseat of her own car and the gun, the square-jawed man aiming matter-of-factly at her.

Though Sara hadn’t exactly been living under a rock for the time that her newborn sobriety settled in, she had done just about the next best thing. At her apartment, she had continued the activities initiated during rehab. No television, too full of reminders. TV was in the background back in her morphine-days, its unintelligible words filling the room like an alien language, colorful shapes she tried to catch with her fingers. Instead, she did a lot of reading. A _lot_. Nothing like good old classics to make you forget your own problems, right? So, Sara read some Shakespeare. And the Bible.

The only moments when she had been coming out of her home these days had been to make it to her AA meetings, in the afternoon to early evenings, but that wasn’t really the place to gossip, and though you would catch some random news items without meaning to, they just hadn’t taken to Sara, had slid off the walls of her mind like soap bubbles popping out of existence.

_Heard about those eight convicts breaking out of Fox River?_

_Oh yeah, wasn’t that just._

_Been sleeping with all the doors and windows double-locked, a’course._

_Can’t never be too careful._

_Never too careful._

But even if Sara could make a link between those bits and pieces and what was currently happening, she could not recognize the men, physically.

For starters, they were dirty.

Real, downright dirty.

She identified the clothes they were wearing as suits – black for the man with the gun, and cream for the younger man who was driving – but the color they had once been was buried far beneath the layers of dust and mud, grey and brown, and a darker, deeper shade that had thickened over the older man’s jacket. It was like the wooden color of her father’s desk at their family house in Illinois, and she knew if she touched it, it would feel dry and shrunken to her fingers.

Though Sara could no longer call herself doctor, she knew the color of blood when she saw it.

Oddly, that was the thing that managed to calm her heartbeat, to ease her back on tracks.

Blood. Two men on the run. A gun.

A desperate situation if she ever knew one, but the kind of situation Sara knew how to handle.

At least the blood part.

In ways – crazy ways, maybe – she was more at home in this kind of crisis than in the one she had been losing her mind over the past few days. Suddenly, the raw chicken and bread and veggies in her grocery bag streamed into the opaque waters of oblivion, and she forgot why she had gone to the market this morning in the first place.

“Is your friend also injured?”

Sara’s even tone as she delivered the inquiry caused both men to fall silent.

Up until then, they had been thrown in their desperate talk, the sort that runs in circles and reeks of slipups. Criminals, Sara thought, like all men, made mistakes when they felt suddenly out of options, when the wheels of doom seemed to be steadily advancing in their direction, and there was nothing else to do to salvage that precious sense of agency than blow your own brains out, and maybe that of anyone else who was unlucky enough to be around.

But it would not end like this for Sara.

She saw the man in the driver’s seat crane his neck behind his shoulder to cast a look at the other, as if to telepathically compare notes as to what she’d just said.

Sara decided not to beat around the bush.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, both eyes directly on the man who held the gun now, and something should be said for that, probably, that she could look him in the eye and manage out coherent speech. “You’ve been bleeding for some time, from what I can tell. Is your friend also injured, or is it just you?”

The man with the gun uttered a vague sound. Only because the corners of his mouth stretched into a rusty, unfamiliar smile, could she identify it as laughter.

“You don’t happen to be a doctor,” he said.

“I do.”

Prickles spread down her tummy as she answered.

_It’s not a lie_.

_Just because I’ve lost the title doesn’t mean I’ve lost my hand_.

Anyways, not like least controversial surgeons than herself were currently piling on their doorstep.

“No,” the man insisted, still with that odd attempt at a smile on his face. “Ah, you can’t be. ‘Cause see, we’ve been hitting nothing but bad luck since this whole thing started. So, that we try and steal a car and have to take you along with us, and you just happen to be the sort of person that could save my life – nah, I don’t believe that.”

Sara had barely been aware of their surroundings when the young man shifted into first gear then eased the car toward the edge of the road.

They had apparently long left the city center behind, though Sara couldn’t throw so much as a wild guess at how long they had been driving.

All she knew was what she could see: that they were currently sitting on the edge of a small wood, with no other cars around, nothing but the road, ahead of them and behind.

Then the younger man was popping his head into the backseat.

This was this closest look at him Sara had gotten since it had all happened.

But even with the benefit of proximity, it was difficult to make a proper evaluation of his features, buried behind the mask of concern that widened the eyes, crunched up the eyebrows.

If this situation had been taking place in some movie – and a movie was the only context in which Sara had ever directly been witness to such situations – the men who had so brutally stumbled upon her and taken her, along with her car, would have been handsome.

Beneath all the layers – dirt, blood and concern – it was hard to say exactly what they were.

But a shudder crept down Sara’s back at the contact of the man’s blue eyes.

Something wrong about them, their diamond-brightness, their necessarily deceptive claim that the meaning behind them must be innocent, pure as rainwater.

Such blue eyes belonged on the face of an angel, not some fugitive willing to steal cars and women alike on his way to freedom.

“Is that true?” He said. Addressing her with the same directness his eyes effortlessly evoked. “Are you a doctor?”

The claim still did not seem exactly a lie in her mouth when she answered, “Yes.”

The man’s eyes – how had the other called him? Max? Mark? Your brain forgot, dropped information when under pressure – went to the man with the gun, with a renewal of that misplaced softness, beseeching.

“Lincoln, please. Let her have a look.”

The other grunted, like a beast you rubbed between the ears, a beast who doesn’t like petting.

“We don’t have a choice. Your wound’s getting worse. Without help –”

“Yes, yes.” Lincoln sighed. “Shame to dodge a bullet with the electric chair then catch an actual bullet running, huh?”

Suddenly, recognition happened, triggered by the man’s casual sarcasm, like two wires connecting inside Sara’s brain.

_Of course_.

Even without knowing about his recent escape –

_Of course of course_.

How could she not know him, the man who killed the vice president’s brother, Lincoln Burrows, to be executed early this summer?

This did not shed light on who the younger man was, the one whose face was slimmer, sharper, all angles, it seemed, when it was presented without the polish of civility and manners.

A face like a maze, Sara suddenly thought.

With only another grunt to signify his reluctance, Lincoln removed his jacket, his body tensing as he extended his arms – yes, the wound must be somewhere just above his pants line, causing excruciating torment but having miraculously avoided the vital organs lodged on the inside of his body. The jacket went, down on the backseat. It took time, because Lincoln did not want to relinquish his hold on the gun or visibly stop pointing it at her. The strict reality of this no longer scared or produced much of an effect on her, and the younger man appeared to find it a slight waste of time, but he allowed Lincoln to have his way without protest, as if in his great distress, he deserved to be humored.

They’d had their share of people they couldn’t trust, along the way.

Then the shirt was undone, button by button, and with each breath, Sara noticed the efforts that went into Lincoln Burrows’ self-composure, the silencing of his pain at every second.

The last few buttons revealed an angry-red circle, above his hipbone, just enough to the side that she could tell it had not touched the intestines. The hole of flesh, coated with caked blood, was no bigger than a shirt button itself, although it gave way to large circles, like ripples in a pond, from bruised-red to pink, and finally dissolving into his skin, whose clean-white tone was something of a surprise, after he had peeled all these layers of dirty clothes.

Sara leaned in closer without thinking of asking for permission.

“Is the bullet out?”

“No.”

Sara was careful not to touch him at first. Pain caused the muscles on his torso to tremble every once in a while – and maybe it was also the contact of her breath on his skin, which she would be close enough to kiss by now.

The thought did not cross her mind exactly, though its reality penetrated her senses, on a level beyond the cool, cozy world of infected wounds and life-and-death where she was most fully herself.

Yes, on some more or less aware dimension, Sara realized at the first second she leaned into the man’s chest that in that car, she was only a woman, and the two fugitives who had so brutally stumbled into her life were only men.

“When did it happen?”

“Last night.” The information was volunteered by the younger man, the one with the angel eyes.

Sara did not look away from the inflammatory flesh before her to look at him, as he spoke, but could feel his gaze on her.

“And I trust you don’t happen to be carrying any clamps and scalpels.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Right.”

Sara reached inside her coat pocket without thinking. Just as quick, the gun was straightened, aiming randomly between her neck and face.

Her pulse was still throbbing but now, it seemed to be all adrenalin – inexplicable. Fear had deserted her and it was not part of fate’s plans that it should return.

She actually smiled, the same smile Sara gave all her patients: soothing and confident, and the right amount of both that it would quiet down even the most stubborn ones.

If ever a smile could say, _Trust me, I’m a doctor_ , then it was that one.

Calmly, Sara carried her gesture through to the end, diving her hand inside her pocket to produce a rubber band she used to tie her hair, after she had gathered it quickly into a long ponytail.

She never went into an OR with her hair loose.

“You’re in luck,” she said. “I don’t think most cars are equipped for emergency surgeries.”

Humor was supposed to make Lincoln more comfortable, but it only seemed to puzzle him, like he was looking at a strange, bright-colored phenomena that left him stupid and sore-eyed.

“Please,” she turned to the younger man then, and the contact of their eyes meeting sank into her, without her having the time to fully be aware of it. “Would you hand me the first-aid kit in my glove box? There should be a pack of plastic gloves in there, too, if you could grab a pair.”

The young man obeyed in silence, so all that could be heard in the car was his fishing around and Lincoln’s regular hoarse breathing.

The bag of groceries she’d purchased lay forgotten, behind her, on the seat.

2

The extraction went as well as possible, or so Sara estimated, given the circumstances. She used antibacterial spray on the wound then tweezers to retrieve the bullet, an operation during which Lincoln groaned a little louder and breathed a little hoarser than he had until then, but he remained rational enough, did not suddenly start waving that gun around or putting holes into the car.

All the while, the younger man was watching her every move with an awed stillness, near fascination, and Sara was aware, shamefully but irrevocably, that she was loving this.

Maybe not _all_ of it.

She could have done without the gun, really, or the whole kidnapping.

It was crazy, crazy.

But she loved, despite herself, that she had regained a sense of her own identity, that it had not been a worn threadbare thing, but shiny and strong, ready to be reclaimed whenever she wished it, despite all the muddle that rehab had been and all the suffering.

She was still a doctor.

She was still Sara Tancredi.

“All right,” Sara said, after she had put the bullet down along with the tweezers. The lack of a telltale _click_ , the sound it would have made if it had been laid on the metallic tray on the side of the operating table, threw her off a little. “I’m almost done.”

She pressed a dry compress to the wound which her recent activities had painfully reopened. Blood now oozed out, but not in alarming proportions.

For the first time since she had started her work, she met the eyes of the younger man and realized he had turned as pale as if he was the one being operated on, sweat beading down his temples.

“Stitches?” He said.

You could hear the guilt in the way he released that single word. Like the pain was his own – or like he wished it were.

Sara remained hesitant for a second.

“A few.”

He nodded.

Lincoln’s face was pressed against the headrest by now, eyes closed, so sweaty himself, Sara knew if she hadn’t been so focused at this time, she would have been struck by how the car smelled unprecedently of maleness.

Sara glanced at the gun, whose barrel was facing the ground.

“Maybe you could let that go now?” She said.

“Uh-huh.” Lincoln said before the other man could open his mouth. He lifted one eye-lid. Sara thought he looked astonishingly like a red, hairless bear that growled even under caresses he might like. “Forget it, Michael. I don’t trust her.”

“Yes you do,” Sara said.

She did not smile again, but it was the same look of soothing confidence on her face.

All patients trust their doctors, in some sense. It’s the only way it can work.

The young man – _Michael_ , Sara’s brain clung to the new piece of information – squinted his eyes pleadingly. “Linc, she’s saving your life. She didn’t have to say she was a doctor, did she? She could have just let you die.”

No melodrama in this summary.

Indeed, Sara had no doubt that, if that bullet had stayed where it was, if the infection had kept spreading and Lincoln had kept on losing blood, he would have been dead within forty-eight hours.

It was lucky – _lucky for them_ – that they had happened to try and steal her particular car.

Unlucky, though, for her recently purchased uncooked dinner-material.

Lincoln’s hold around the gun persisted, though it was loose and unfocused by now. Sara made no further mention of it and went on with the stitching up, which Lincoln endured with long, muffled whines that were nearly howls, but no screaming.

When it was over, he released a breath of pure relief, sweat clinging to his eyelids. It oddly reminded Sara of the raw exhale some of the men she made love with let out in the throes of orgasm.

Yet she didn’t blush, and her hands, now and throughout her work, were perfectly unshaking.

A moment of stillness – how long? Three seconds? Five minutes? – and when Sara looked toward Michael, she realized, in the way he was watching him, really, that Lincoln was asleep.

“Thank you,” Michael said.

He leant into the backseat, his slim body squeezing through the two seats at the front, and Sara had to straighten her back against the seat a little so that the movement didn’t cause for their bodies to touch.

With a hand that looked tender, he plucked the gun from Lincoln’s loose hold and hooked it at a holster on his left hip, which the dirty jacket of his suit kept concealed.

Whether it was a sign of gratitude, or for fear that she might grab it suddenly and shoot them both, Sara couldn’t have guessed.

“I suppose you’re welcome.”

“He would have died without you,” he repeated, as if that was supposed to express the weight of his debt to her.

Sara could not help but wonder at the emotion in Michael’s voice, it clung to you like shards of broken glass; you could not get away scratch-free.

“You know what he’s done,” she said.

Couldn’t help herself. A few years ago, back when the trial was taking place, it had never occurred to think anyone, anyone at all on the planet, cared much about the fate of Lincoln Burrows.

Michael chuckled. The smile was different from the other man’s – it held echoes of boyhood, innocence, which in this context were startling and absurd.

Hadn’t _all_ of it been absurd?

“Oh, yes.” He said. “Trust me. I’m about the only person in this country who knows what he’s done.”

Sara’s lips opened on silence.

She found she wanted to look away from the man’s blue eyes but they, too, had that absurd magic in them she could not break free from.

“I’m sorry that this happened –” He paused, disgusted at the cowardice of his phrasing. “That we did this to you. But we can’t afford for you to call the cops. Not until we’re out of Chicago.”

A sigh, not exactly apologetic. He had the look about him of a man willing to do what needs to be done, because he’s gone too far already to collapse at the collateral damage that’s piling up at his feet.

He may collapse, Sara thought. But not now.

Not until he and this man were safe.

“After we’ve driven a little farther, we’ll find another vehicle. Then we’ll have to tie you up – I’m sorry – to make sure you don’t go calling the cops until another few hours. It’s not much of a head start, but we can’t afford anything short of it.”

Sara surprised him and herself by laughing.

Tonight, her father would ring at the door of her apartment, accompanied by his small flock of bodyguards as ever, and he would mutter impatient complaints under his breath, shuffling his feet on her doormat. _That girl can’t ever straighten out,_ he’d say, _never straighten out_.

He’d think she was – what? Out, drinking with older men, or shooting that nasty poison into the pretty vein in the crook of her elbow. She no longer bruised herself doing it still her father would sigh, looking at it, as though that blue streak running slim under her skin were the very image of her life gone wrong, her pathway to hell.

And even if her father knew the truth, what then?

Even if he could somehow _guess_ that what stopped her from showing up at their dinner appointment was that she had miraculously been kidnapped by runaway cons – she suspected part of him would still blame her for it, more or less consciously.

_It takes Sara to have something like that happen to her,_ he’d say, as a joke, but the sort of jokes you mean.

It was just too late for her to redeem herself in his eyes.

How could that not have been plain to her from the start?

If she had been the perfect picture-daughter he’d wanted, then a kidnapping would be an unforgiveable violation of her sacred innocence and devotion to family.

Now, she’d made too many mistakes, too many messes, and even the bad luck she helplessly dragged along would find no other blameworthy head than hers, to her father.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said, as if her laughter was a puzzling, slightly frightening show of hysteria.

As if describing what he was going to do to her was something he could even apologize for, like bumping into someone in the street.

“You’re a man with a plan,” she said without thinking.

“What?”

“My father used to say there’s two kinds of men who do well in life, the spontaneous genius kind and those who have a plan.”

A smile, not really shy but distant, a way of joining in on her laughter without pretending that the situation was all right.

“Does it look to you like I’ve done well in life?”

“You’re the one who’s carrying a gun right now.”

He tilted his head in concession. “What about you? Which category or you?”

Sara looked slightly aside, toward the window, out of which she could see how the sun had started lowering already in the afternoon sky.

There was nothing to answer.

Those two categories her father spoke of were meant for men. He had said nothing of women.

So she said instead, “When I make plans, they tend to turn into recipes for disaster.”

Michael nodded, and with the corner of his eye, she saw that he looked solemn.

Like he knew more than a little about what she meant.

…

**End Notes** : I don’t know why this came to me. You may or may not have noticed from my other stories, but I have a special interest in food and what it means on a social gender-related level. The story wrote itself for the most part. I may write more chapters (I could see the brothers finding out Sara’s the Governor’s daughter and coming up with a plan for getting Lincoln exonerated) but for now I just don’t know. Please share your thoughts and reactions!


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